There's Exactly One Celeb Comment Nobody Needs To Make In 2018

As someone who makes a living writing about celebrities on the internet, I have a confession: I almost always read the comments. I read the comments like the comments were a just-released Harry Potter book where all of my favorite characters kiss and Sirius Black magically comes back to life. And I'm not just talking about the comments on my articles; I read the comments everywhere. I am obsessed with finding out what random strangers think about everything, and have seen everything there is to see, comment-wise — still, there's one comment that I see too often, and it's possibly the least helpful and most telling thing anyone can say about themselves.

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"I don't know who this person is."

He has headlined three world tours, but still, who?

Getty ImagesTerry Wyatt

To the people who make this comment on articles about young celebrities, or old celebrities, or established ones, or obscure ones, allow me to say congratulations. You don't know who this person is. Sometimes you phrase your astonishingly original sentiment as "why is this person famous" or "why is this important lol," but no matter how you phrase it, you're saying the same thing. You're saying that something that has been written is not worth writing because you, Gregory P. from Cedar Rapids, have never heard about the content. Congratulations for not knowing something about a thing that merited a writeup in any of the thousands of online publications that exist, and congratulations for having the self-assurance to think that you personally not knowing about something means your opinion on it warranted the effort it took to write your comment.

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I see a lot of these comments on articles about celebrities that are just now on the rise. Disney stars, rappers, recording artists, or — god forbid — Instagram influencers who have followings that skew towards a young, usually female audience. In identifying as someone who doesn't know who the celebrity is, the commenter telegraphs their position as someone who is too cool and erudite to know what's going on in pop culture. In taking time out of their day to let people know that they, Awesome Person, don't register the ebb and flow of the culture that permeates most people's everyday lives, they're conveying superiority, and that is absolute hogwash.

You know who this is, stop lying.

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Nobody is smarter than somebody else because they don't know who the Kardashians are. Nobody is better than anyone else because they can't recognize a Shawn Mendes song. People who like popular things aren't dumb, and people who take joy in participating in the dynamic, interesting world of celebrity and fame aren't worth less than people who'd rather read Goethe and weep about the human condition. Many of the people who can rattle off the details of Bella Thorne's latest Instagram comment are also the people who can speak intelligently on world politics or African-American literature in the 20th century. The world is wide, and no pair of interests is mutually exclusive.

As this complicated world gets more and more difficult to deal with, it's increasingly important to let people have fun with things. When someone says "I don't know who this person is," it doesn't necessarily devalue the enjoyment someone else gets when they love that thing, but it's a wholly unnecessary declaration that the things those people love are not worth paying attention to. Nobody in the history of humanity has been impressed when someone doesn't know something, so to decrease the levels of condescension in the world it's in everyone's best interest to follow one simple rule. If you're interested in something, engage in it. If you're not, don't. There's nothing to be proven by claiming you don't know things. It's not important to let people know that you're ignorant of the things other people like. In fact it's the least important thing in the world. Everyone should save their energy for the things they like, and if I have one wish for 2018, it's that people enjoy what they enjoy. And leave everyone else alone.

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